TechnoBuzz

David Sacks: Nonprofits need to manufacture problems in America to stay in business David Sacks: “Here's the systemic problem with nonprofits and NGOs. Let me just contrast it with business. In business, you set up a company, the company has to make revenue, it has to make profits. And if it doesn't, it's going to go out of business, right? Because it'll lose money. So there's a feedback mechanism from the market. With an NGO, nonprofit, what have you, they raise money. They don't sell things. They fundraise from donors in order to engage in an activity, but what happens over time is the actual activities may stop mattering, and all that really matters is they're able to keep fundraising, right? Because they're just trying to figure out a justification to keep going back to donors to get more and more money out of them. That's what perpetuates the organization.” Chamath: “ Why wouldn't the Southern Poverty Law Center focus on southern poverty? Which is an issue that actually still exists in some shape or form. Why do you call it one thing, focus on racism, and then all of a sudden whip up fake racism?” Sacks: “I do think that at one time in this country, civil rights was a noble cause, a very legitimate cause. We had the legacy of segregation and Jim Crow, and there were groups that were set up to basically change that, and they succeeded. But again, no one in an NGO or a nonprofit ever declares victory. When Obama got elected in 2008, regardless of whether you liked Obama or not, or agreed with his politics, I thought that at that point, most people could see that this was not a racist country. Whatever else you could say, the fact that the highest office in the land was not denied to anybody showed that this country was not holding people back based on their skin color. And instead of just basically packing up shop and saying, ‘Okay, we've achieved our goal,’ the goalposts all got moved. Remember, that's when the whole anti-racism thing started, was around Obama's second term. If they just said at that time, ‘You know what, we're going to move the goalposts from equality of opportunity to equality of results. We're going to basically make everyone equal at the finish line,’ which is to say, identity socialism. People would've said, ‘Eh, no, we're not on board for that.’ So instead, they created this whole new terminology to justify it. And it's taken us years to unpack that and realize what's really going on.”